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Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#271

Post by icebraining »

mattkrause wrote: post #228
sneak wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employee, and no one else, gets to decide what they want for their body. The fact is, OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body. What is deeply immoral is third parties using sticks and firearms to overrule that person’s choices. Their body, their choice.

How, in practice, is this supposed to work? The boss shows you a rickety ladder and says “Climb up there or you’re clocking out for the day!” You, drawing on the extensive mechanical engineering and actuarial experience that got you this $15/hr warehouse job, evaluate the likelihood of it collapsing and the expected bills, pain, and suffering if it does. “Looks shakey—give me another $2.73 first”, you say. The boss r…

I'd say the libertarian's response would be that organizations like UL (which already does work for OSHA) would get hired by the company to certify their workplace, which would then serve as enticement for job candidates.

This would essentially make job safety another "perk", like flex time and friday pizza - available to some, based on the scarcity of their skills.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#272

Post by anigbrowl »

rayiner wrote: post #258
JudgeWapner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the back of the rank and closer to being fired? That bothers you ...think about that.

> That bothers you...think about that. India went through a socialist phase where for decades people “emphasize[d] with the poor” and implemented public policy. And where did that lead? Decades of economic malaise. In 1991, the World Bank and IMF required economic liberalization as part of a bail out, and starting in 2000 growth accelerated dramatically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. As someo…

Oh dear no. Capitalism is a miracle for people who are on the winning side, of the equation, it's awful for people who are not and are mostly trapped on the wrong side of that divide. As environmental degradation encroaches, that latter group will gradually swallow more and more people.

It's not a matter of empathy vs rationality as you suggest, but of under what conditions empathic strategies are efficient and self-sustaining. You assume the world (including society) as objective and rewarding unempathic rationality, but many social relations are wholly arbitrary and are optimized to reward particular strategies.

Evidence from statistical mechanics points to the evolutionary stability of self-organizing decentralized peer-sensitive strategies.

You know, I was reading the other day about Jeff Bezos being worth $118 billion. What is so great about maximizing such a quantity? Jeff Bezos doesn't know what to do with his spare money besides spending it on rockets. Would be really be functionally 'poorer' if he woke up tomorrow to find himself worth 'only' $18 billion, and the other $100 billion evenly distributed across the population (everyone in the world better off by $14), the US population (everyone in the US better off by $300), or the population of Amazon employees (everyone better off by approximately $180,000).

Supposedly it's more 'efficient' for Jeff Bezos to be in charge of all this money, but Jeff Bezos' wealth depends to a large degree on his ability to keep labor prices just above those of other employers hiring from the same pool in any given market. You're maximizing the extraction of value from the combination of capital and labor, but in a parasitical fashion that leaves Jeff Bezos with an (almost) unimaginably vast surplus and many of his employees with no surplus at all. You might argue that such workers should increase their economic value so as to command a higher wage, but in reality most of them are already working near the envelope of their physical capacity while being too tired and time-poor to undertake independent or institutional study to significantly improve their earning potential.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#273

Post by harryh »

mikeash wrote: post #268
harryh wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. If Amazon pays their workers better, that won’t fix the millions of other workers stuck with bad pay and abusive jobs. That's not what I meant by "more efficient." If every company employing low skilled labor suddenly raised pay above market wages it might help all those workers. But it would mean that prices for things produced by unskilled laborers were artificially high and prices produced by h…

I don’t understand, how is that different from taxing and giving workers money that way? They should have the same effect in terms of economic efficiency. The only reason we use taxes for this sort of thing is because it’s harder to cheat.

If you do it by pushing wages around artificially then you artificially change the prices of certain goods relative to others.

If you do it via taxes and transfer payments then you don't distort the prices of goods.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#274

Post by mikeash »

rayiner wrote: post #269
mikeash wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more like blaming the local power company for local energy prices. Nobody is blaming Amazon for wages worldwide. They’re blaming Amazon for the wages of their own workers. And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduc…

That analysis is wrong because it ignores two facts (1) Retail is a highly competitive, low margin business; and (2) Economic systems are dynamic, not static. Amazon’s profit margins are in low single digit percent. If Amazon pays above market wages and keeps prices the same, that creates an opportunity for Wal-Mart to come in and lower prices by using lower cost labor. Customers will go to Wal-Mart instead, because…

If Amazon pays their workers more but keeps prices the same, how does that create an opportunity for a competitor?

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#275

Post by mikeash »

harryh wrote: post #270
mikeash wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t you do that now? Amazon takes in billions in profit, meaning that their prices are substantially higher than they could be. Why aren’t you (or some other competitor) taking advantage of this? It’s funny how this sort of argument never comes up in the context of taking profits.

Competitors do take advantage of this! There is vicious price competition for most of the kinds of goods that amazon ships from its warehouses. This competition has pushed profit margins into the single digits (probably low single digits). There's really not any room for prices to fall further with given technology. Retail is BRUTALLY competitive.

And yet some retailers make tons of profit. If it were so easy to swoop in and defeat the top dog with lower prices, how is Amazon still dominating?

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#276

Post by mikeash »

harryh wrote: post #273
mikeash wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand, how is that different from taxing and giving workers money that way? They should have the same effect in terms of economic efficiency. The only reason we use taxes for this sort of thing is because it’s harder to cheat.

If you do it by pushing wages around artificially then you artificially change the prices of certain goods relative to others. If you do it via taxes and transfer payments then you don't distort the prices of goods.

How are taxes not artificial? How do taxes not distort the prices of goods?

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#277

Post by harryh »

mikeash wrote: post #275
harryh wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitors do take advantage of this! There is vicious price competition for most of the kinds of goods that amazon ships from its warehouses. This competition has pushed profit margins into the single digits (probably low single digits). There's really not any room for prices to fall further with given technology. Retail is BRUTALLY competitive.

And yet some retailers make tons of profit. If it were so easy to swoop in and defeat the top dog with lower prices, how is Amazon still dominating?

As I said before: "This competition has pushed profit margins into the single digits"

This is not tons of profit. Your assertion is incorrect.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#278

Post by harryh »

mikeash wrote: post #276
harryh wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do it by pushing wages around artificially then you artificially change the prices of certain goods relative to others. If you do it via taxes and transfer payments then you don't distort the prices of goods.

How are taxes not artificial? How do taxes not distort the prices of goods?

Because the taxes fall on everyone and not just the buyers of low paid labor.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#279

Post by dpwm »

enlyth wrote: post #15

I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings. One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless. Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them ove…

I was at a graduate careers fair in a city where Amazon had just opened offices. Naturally, Amazon had a stall at this careers fair. The person running their stall was telling an audience of maybe six or seven other people that Amazon was the kind of company where if you could find a path around their warehouse that would shave even a single second off a warehouse worker's journey, they'd make them walk it. The audience were quite impressed by this.

I suddenly found myself the other side of having said "what an awful place to work," and receiving a mix of bewildered and hostile looks from every other person around that stall.

I'm pretty sure the claim was hyperbole – the practical side of getting people to walk a particular path would have been my follow-up question, if I'd thought of it in time. Even so, the claim revealed a mentality of workers as robots that I think helped explain some of the news stories of extraordinary conditions of their warehouse workers.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#280

Post by WengerPen »

friendlybus wrote: post #256
beecat wrote: post #254

If I think about it, I feel pretty dehumanized myself each time I click through a clumsy AWS GUI for a set of shoddy services that my company pays 60k a month for the privilege of running our operations and storing our business intelligence on the computers of the one entity that has not only the financial muscle but also the lack of moral scrupples to use that intelligence to enter our market and outcompete us. Juss…

Glad someone finally said it. What's stopping these data collecting companies from cornering a huge amount of markets?

When you reach that size, you are not looking for investments in the millions, you are looking for the billions.
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